Transcript SEO-Best-Practices-with-WCM

SEO Best Practices with Web
Content Management
Brent Arrington, Services Developer, Hannon Hill
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director, Hannon Hill
2009 Cascade Server User’s Conference
Agenda
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What is SEO?
Why do you want to make SEO a priority?
What things does SEO affect?
How to do it
What not to do
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
What is SEO?
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the
process of improving website design,
architecture, and content to increase traffic
from organic search engine results.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Why do you want to make SEO a Priority?
•Majority of web traffic comes from search
engines
• Effective SEO efforts will result in increased
visibility and rank in search results which in turn,
= more traffic!
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
What does SEO affect?
• Location in search result listings
• Search result keywords for which your site
shows up as a result
• The number of people visiting your site
• The number of people you are able to educate
and/or convert as prospects.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
What things affect SEO?
• Correlation levels between keywords, content,
and site structure
• Number of links within your site
• Number of links to and from your site
• Links from sites to your own with a high Google
PageRank
• Relevant naming of pages and content
• Site architecture
• Site design
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
What is Google PageRank?
• Google PageRank is a method used by Google
to determine page importance or relevance
for website pages.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
How to do it
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Fresh, Quality Content that is updated
frequently
• Search engines crawl sites and use a complex algorithm
to determine things like quality/relevancy of content to
keywords, other site copy, anchor text, etc.
• Cascade Server Solution – use Cascade’s reporting
functionality to evaluate content age and last updates.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Metadata
• Metadata includes things like titles, display
names, keywords, summaries, etc.
• System administrators and developers are
able to create custom metadata fields to meet
the specific needs of your organization.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Metadata continued…
• Let’s take a look at some specific metadata-related
examples…
– Metadata and Cascade assets
– Creating and applying custom Metadata Sets
– Asset factories and metadata
• Cascade Server Solution – Using Cascade’s custom
metadata sets, you can place key metadata elements like
Title, Display Name and Keywords in-line in the edit screens
of pages, make specified metadata elements required, and
create asset factories that prompt content contributors to
add metadata to newly created pages.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Naming Conventions
• Page and folder names should clearly identify the content
discussed in those pages and site sections.
• System names (which make up the content URL) should
also correlate to page content and should be separated by a
hyphen.
i.e. - if you have a page for transfer student admissions:
System Name- transfer-student-admissions
URL - http://universityabc.edu/admissions/transfer-studentadmissions.html
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Naming Conventions Continued…
• In the previous example, the heading on the
page may be “University ABC Transfer Student
Admissions.”
• Search engines place more weight on <h1>
tags, than they do <h2> tags, and so on. As an
SEO best practice, put the most important
headings in <h1> tags.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Naming Conventions Continued…
• As a best practice – all content, page titles, headings,
system names, and display names should correlate to
each other.
• Cascade Server Solution(s) –
– use Asset Factory plug-ins to automatically create SEOfriendly page and folder names, based on title or display
name.
– use Cascade’s validation rules to require page titles,
keywords, and/or other metadata.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Keywords
• Keywords are important both within Cascade
and your content, and as they relate to the
“outside” Web.
• Search engines analyze the density of
keywords in-use on a site, and measure
keyword use and saturation to further gauge
content relevancy and correlation levels.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Keywords continued…
• In Cascade, keywords typically come in comma-separated
lists entered at the page-level
• Use Google’s Keyword Tool and Analytics to identify
keywords
• As a best practice – always include page metadata,
including keywords, when creating and editing page
content.
• Cascade Server Solution – use Cascade to create a shared
library of researched and targeted keywords for your site
and to require keywords with custom Metadata Sets.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Site architecture
• Setting up your site architecture in a logical,
hierarchical format, allows for link
concentration and importance to be properly
spread around your site.
• Furthermore, a hierarchical folder structure
concentrates more links back to your
homepage, which typically results in a higher
PageRank for your homepage.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Site architecture continued…
• In the scenario above, your Company page’s PR
would be increased by the external link, which in
turn, would boost your Home page’s PR
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Site architecture continued…
• As a best practice - place pages of lesser
importance or relevancy further down your
architectural ladder to give them less weight
in affecting your site’s homepage PageRank
and vise versa.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Alt Text
• ALT text for images, files, and tables is
important for both SEO and web accessibility.
• Cascade Server Solution – use Cascade’s Asset
Factories and custom Metadata Sets to
require alt text and/or other metadata for
tables, images, and files.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Linking
• Links are a huge part of SEO. When search
engines crawl and index, links guide them in
the direction to do so.
• External links are important, but don’t forget,
internal links can count for just as much!
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Linking Best Practices
• Link to content within your own site wherever it
makes sense to do so.
• Partner up with other sites (where it makes sense
to do so) with a high PageRank and garner
linkbacks to your own site that will improve its
PageRank.
• Use descriptive anchor text – i.e. not “click here”
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Linking Best Practices continued…
• Cascade Server Solution – use Cascade’s link
management and link checking to check
broken site links regularly. Make sure you
correct these errors.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Sitemaps and Site Indices
• Use Cascade Server to create a strong sitemap
that you keep updated.
• Submit this sitemap to Google and republish it
often.
• Cascade Server Solution – use Cascade to
automate/auto-update sitemap and site index
creation.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Web Design and SEO
• Good use of meta data (should be specific to
each page’s content)
• Text > Graphics/Flash
• W3C Compliance
• “Shallow” directory structure
• Images optimized for file size/load time
• Avoid navigation generated by client-side
script. CSS + static list elements > JavaScript
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
What NOT to do
• Keyword Stuffing
• Don’t hide text or links by making it match the background color or
using hidden text.
• Don’t name pages with system names like “page-1.”
• Don’t link only to your homepage from internal pages. Links to the
homepage are extremely important, but won’t help SEO when used
on their own.
• Use shell or empty pages that house no useful content.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Summary
• Keep content fresh, relevant, and update it regularly.
• Put efforts towards ensuring high relevancy and correlation between page
names, headings, titles, URLS, and keywords.
• Automate SEO processes with Cascade – create sitemaps, use Asset
Factory plug-ins for naming conventions, and require users to enter
metadata.
• Organize your site structure in a logical, hierarchical, and well-named way.
• Use internal links wherever possible and get links to and from your site
externally.
• Make it easy for search engines to crawl and index your content with
sitemaps and indexes.
• Use best practices in web design standards, and ensure alt text is used
where applicable.
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer
Questions?
09/28/2009
Morgan Griffith, Marketing Director &
Brent Arrington, Services Developer